Have We Found The Mental Health Diet?

As new research finds that a diet clinically proven to control high blood pressure could also future-proof your mental health, WH asks...

- Vicky Spratt

Your attention was probably elsewhere in the late 90s. Watching the music video for “Wannabe” again and again to decide which Spice Girl you were most like or trying to work out if Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet could both have fitted on that floating door, perhaps.

Regardless, you may have been too preoccupied to have spotted a study published in The New England Journal Of Medicine in 1997 about how a specific way of eating can significantly influence blood pressure. The dietary approaches to stop hypertension (DASH, to its friends) diet was found to reduce hypertension substantially (hence the name), thanks to the reduced fat consumption that came with a diet rich in whole grains, fruit, vegetables and low-fat dairy. Cool story for anyone looking to reduce their blood-pressure stats. But also relevant for pretty much everyone else because – so says a growing body of research – this niche 90s diet could be the key to future-proofing your mind.

More than two decades after DASH was first conceived, a study presented to the American Academy of Neurology found that those who followed the DASH diet, or something similar, were less likely to develop depression than those who didn’t. Conversely, those same researchers from Rush University Medical Center in the US found that the more closely participants followed a typical Western diet (high in saturated fat and red meat, low in fruit and veg), the more likely they were to develop depression. “This is a relatively small study that was observational in nature, so we can’t claim a cause and-effect relationship,” says Dr Laurel Cherian, assistant professor in the Department of Neurological Sciences at Rush and lead author of the study. “But I think the results are one more piece in a larger puzzle that is coming together to show us that diet is a valuable weapon in our arsenal against depression.”